The Most Active and Friendliest
Affiliate Marketing Community Online!

“Propeller”/  Direct Affiliate

spam traps

I

Iss Meftah

Guest
To put it simply, a “spam trap” (or commonly known as a “trap”) is an address that accepts mail but does not belong to a real user. There are two main types of traps: pristine and recycled.

Pristine spam traps are addresses that never belonged to a real user, and never signed up for any mail. Mailing to (or “hitting”) this type of trap address is very serious because it means that the address was “scraped” from the Internet. You generally end up with these addresses on your list as a marketer if you have purchased a list of addresses or a naughty affiliate of yours engages in purchasing lists or scraping addresses. Any way you slice it, it’s very bad to mail to those addresses and is indicative of poor acquisition practices.

Recycled spam traps are previously active addresses, which potentially belonged to a real user, but have been repurposed as a trap address after 6 or more months of inactivity and “conditioning” (meaning they returned a hard bounce error for a reasonable amount of time). It’s easy to end up with this type of trap address on your mailing list as a marketer if you don’t practice good list hygiene by removing inactive and invalid accounts regularly.

The bottom line is: These addresses have no value to you as a sender since no one is on the other end reading your email. No good will come from mailing to spam traps.
 
Fascinating stuff. I signed up for something called Herculist which allowed me to send my offer to 1000 email a day every other day. In return my mailbox was flooded with dozens of offers from others doing the same thing. It was not a list building service as I never got a list. I did it thinking I would get some opt ins. I did not. All I got was lots of other offers. It was free but you obviously get what you pay for.
 
There's a service (towerdata) which checks your emails for spam traps, bounces etc, and can also confirm if the email is active (ie opening emails).
 
How do you guys handle inactivity? Do you stop mailing if someone hasn't opened an email in a certain period?
 
There's a service (towerdata) which checks your emails for spam traps, bounces etc, and can also confirm if the email is active (ie opening emails).
I just tried the free trial from verias.com, I found them on this forum, my point of contact was Devin who was really helpful and the service did a great job. And cheaper than others I have used.
 
I just tried the free trial from verias.com, I found them on this forum, my point of contact was Devin who was really helpful and the service did a great job. And cheaper than others I have used.

Yup, we always point our clients in their direction as well.
 
To put it simply, a “spam trap” (or commonly known as a “trap”) is an address that accepts mail but does not belong to a real user. There are two main types of traps: pristine and recycled.

Pristine spam traps are addresses that never belonged to a real user, and never signed up for any mail. Mailing to (or “hitting”) this type of trap address is very serious because it means that the address was “scraped” from the Internet. You generally end up with these addresses on your list as a marketer if you have purchased a list of addresses or a naughty affiliate of yours engages in purchasing lists or scraping addresses. Any way you slice it, it’s very bad to mail to those addresses and is indicative of poor acquisition practices.

Recycled spam traps are previously active addresses, which potentially belonged to a real user, but have been repurposed as a trap address after 6 or more months of inactivity and “conditioning” (meaning they returned a hard bounce error for a reasonable amount of time). It’s easy to end up with this type of trap address on your mailing list as a marketer if you don’t practice good list hygiene by removing inactive and invalid accounts regularly.

The bottom line is: These addresses have no value to you as a sender since no one is on the other end reading your email. No good will come from mailing to spam traps.
is there any way to know if a curtain Email is a spam trap?
 
is there any way to know if a curtain Email is a spam trap?

There is, but nothing is 100 percent fool proof. My service can filter out spam traps on a basic level. However, spam traps are not all detectable - if they have not yet sprung the 'trap' there is no way of detection. If data is purchased and quality comes into question I recommend adding an additional spam trap removal service like Impression Wise to you data hygiene process.
 
MI
Back